FALL IS FULL OF FUN!

It's been a busy few weeks! Work all week, then weekends seemingly chock-full of stuff to do to. On September 19th, there was the Brazilian Night at Stuart's—a fundraiser for our Rotary Foundation project in, where else, Brazil. An excellent evening! I had volunteered to bring a dessert as part of my contribution to the potluck part of the meal, and then got wondering what on earth to bring. I finally decided to bring two batches of cookies, one that seemed very Canadian—molasses crinkles—but then I got kind of stumped, as I wanted to bring something Brazilian to make the connection between the two countries. I finally Googled "Brazil" plus "dessert", and after much poking around here and there, I finally found a recipe for some "Brazilian Coffee Cookies". It met the criteria I had set for myself for this dessert—it had to be Brazilian, and it had to use ingredients I already had in the house. And voilà! A new recipe in my repertoire. They're really quite excellent. So much so that I took the leftover cookies on the next day's expedition, and to another event the following weekend. Yum. I tottered home at a respectable hour, in order to be up bright and early for the wine tour in the Cowichan Valley (see post below).

On to the next weekend. Saturday was a fun agility trial, hosted by our good pirate friends at ScallyWaggs. As always, lots of fun. And, as usual, Island Dog Sports set up our little "compound". We're way too organized, let me tell you. We're like a well-oiled machine. There's always everything anybody needs. AND we hatched a plot for what the IDS compound might be like for the ScallyWaggs Howlaween trial at the end of October. That should be tons of fun. The day's runs went pretty well for everyone. It's such a relaxing atmosphere to run your dogs in that they all seem to do especially well. Lorri was a bit late arriving; she needed to be sure that Randy—who has got to be the luckiest man on the planet for surviving that head-on collision between his motorcycle and that car with nary a broken bone—was alright to be left on his own. I entered Gemma in the last run of the day, Hoopers. After saying to Eric, "Be ready for plenty of off-courses...", Gemma suprised me by going exactly where I told her. She did great. I was very proud of her. An excellent introduction to a BIG agility course for her. I think she's pretty used to the sounds and atmosphere of agility trials by now; she's been hauled along to quite a few since she arrived, but this was the first one where she actually got to run. She can't enter "real" trials until she's 18 months old. Only eight and a half months to go! Let's see now, that would be around June 15th, 2010, give or take.

Last Thursday, I was madly baking for the bake sale part of our United Way fundraiser at work: a ball hockey tournament that was held on Friday. This is the second year we've put on the "Harbour Road Classic", trying to involve the other businesses on the street where our office is located in some good clean fun while raising money for United Way. It went very well, raising $1200 of our overall campaign goal of $5,000. I was on a vacation day on Friday, but I dropped by anyway, between errands, and took some pictures. They're posted on my Flickr site, but here are a couple to give you an idea of the action.

From ball hockey, it was on to the AVID agility trial at the Saanich Fairgrounds. I got set up that evening, but had decided not to enter any of the runs: they were essentially primarily speed classes, and my dogs are definitely not of the speedy variety. At least not yet. They're getting better at it, but there is definitely absolutely no greyhound in their genetics! Saturday and Sunday, we did our best out on the agility courses, with lovely walks in the autumn sunshine in between runs. Abby brought home one Q (qualifying score), and Zack brought home two. Peni dropped in on Sunday afternoon to watch us run, which was wonderful of her to do. She and some of the gals had already had a busy day themselves, walking in the CIBC Run for the Cure with the dogs earlier on in the day. Good on ya, ladies!

Zack had a good last run, but I had glanced at the whiteboard with the required course times that the dogs had to run under to qualify, and it said "46 seconds" — and when Zack and I finished the course, I looked at the timer and it said "46:12". Dang. Missed it by THAT much, as Maxwell Smart was prone to say. Still, it had been a great run. I was very pleased with how well he had motored around the course. Peni helped me pack up all our things and put them in the car, but then I went back in to see if they would post the final results before I left for the day. I glanced at the computer screen, which just happened to be on a part of the results table that had Zack's name on it, and there was a Q checked off. I was very confused. So I hung around for a little while longer, to see if that Q actually appeared on the printed results. It did. Along with the required course time—which was 52 seconds, not 46. So he was in well under the time allowed. I guess no one had changed the whiteboard from the previous class, so that was where the confusion stemmed from. Off to the ribbon bin I hustled, to pick up Zack's second Q ribbon of the day.

Back home to cram in the household chores for the week...and back to work on Monday. But hey, it's a long weekend coming up. Hope the weather holds up for that. It looks like it's going to be gorgeous all week...sunny and relatively warm for Autumn. Perfect.